KINGS NOTEBOOK: Season seats close to sellout; St. Louis ex-coach Davis Payne named assistant

If you plan on attending a Kings game this season, you better make a plan to buy tickets soon or risk having to buy on the secondary market.

The Kings, on the heels of winning the organization's first Stanley Cup last month, already have sold an unprecedented number of season tickets - 15,000 - for the upcoming season, according to Chris McGowan, the team's chief operating officer.

"Ticket sales have been really, really brisk," McGowan said Friday. "We're getting to a point where organizationally, it's all about managing inventory. We're getting slim in terms of availability. Season-ticket wise, we're in a position where we're going to stop selling season tickets because we're going to be capped out.

"The season-ticket base would be so high where we wouldn't have an ability to sell any more. We have to take care of partial-plan holders, and we want to keep (tickets) for group ticket sales and individual buyers when we go on sale."

It's a good problem to have for the Kings, but certainly not so much for fans.

Season tickets likely will be available for up to two more weeks, according to McGowan. Individual tickets likely will be available sometime in September.

"To be honest, we'll probably put some tickets on sale for the general public for individual games in coordination with the preseason opening," McGowan said. "I suspect they'll go quickly. We're in unchartered waters. If we put tickets on sale, they sell right away. We've always done well, but we've never had this much demand."

The Kings have such a passionate fan base, that even last year they sold 12,000 season tickets. But they won the Stanley Cup in such dominant and surprising fashion - going 16-4 as the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference - that they attracted a new fan base. And the Kings want to make sure they have some tickets available for those fans who have jumped on the bandwagon, too.

The Kings should sell out the season. The only other time that's happened in franchise history was the 1991-92 season, when the Kings played at the Forum (capacity 16,005). Staples Center holds 18,118 for hockey games.

Demand is so high, McGowan predicts the Kings will institute a waiting list this season for the first time - something many NFL teams, like the Green Bay Packers - do.

The Kings are in the process of assigning new seats to new season-ticket holders, and once that's complete, McGowan said the remaining seats will be "slim pickings."

"Once we exhaust all these processes, we'll start a waiting list for season tickets, which we suspect will grow," McGowan said.

This was such an interesting dilemma for the Kings - developing a plan for a predicted season sellout - that Kelly Cheeseman, the senior vice president of sales, spent the past couple of months discussing strategy with other NHL teams who have been through this such as the Ducks, Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, Vancouver and Minnesota.

"I always wondered what it would be like when we won the Cup," McGowan said. "The only other time I've seen demand like this was when the Galaxy (another AEG franchise) signed David Beckham. Tickets were selling left and right.

"This is bigger than that, but it's very similar. I always knew in this town that it would be like this, but you never really know until it happens."

The Kings hired former St.Louis head coach Davis Payne as an assistant to coach Darryl Sutter, the Stanley Cup champions announced Friday.

St. Louis fired Payne on Nov. 6 after nearly two years behind the bench. Ken Hitchcock took over and led the Blues to the second round of the playoffs, where the Kings swept them.

Payne will replace Jamie Kompon, who left the Kings for the same job with the Chicago Blackhawks earlier this month.